2006-01-29 04:00:00 PDT Washington -- A program that was supposed to help the National Security Agency identify electronic data crucial to the nation's safety is not up and running more than six years and $1.2 billion after it was launched, according to current and former government officials.

The classified project, code-named Trailblazer, was promoted as the NSA's state-of-the art tool for sifting through an ocean of modern-day digital communications and uncovering key nuggets to protect the nation against an ever-changing collection of enemies.

Its main goal when it was launched in 1999 was to allow NSA analysts to connect the 2 million bits of data the agency collects every hour -- a task that has grown increasingly complex with the advent of the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging -- and enable them quickly to identify the most important information.

The stakes couldn't be higher.

A major failure leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks involved communications intelligence, investigators found. More than 30 hints of the impending attacks had been collected in the previous three years but had gone unnoted in the NSA's databases, according to a joint congressional inquiry into pre-Sept. 11 intelligence operations.

The NSA initiative, which was designed to spot and analyze such information, has resulted in little more than detailed schematic drawings filling almost an entire wall, according to intelligence experts familiar with the program. After an estimated $1.2 billion in development costs, only a few isolated analytical and technical tools have been produced, said an intelligence expert with extensive knowledge of the program.

Trailblazer is "the biggest boondoggle going on now in the intelligence community," said Matthew Aid, who has advised three recent federal commissions and panels that investigated the Sept. 11 intelligence failures.

Complex from the start -- the initial Trailblazer plan called for more than 1,000 priority items -- the project ballooned as it was passed through three separate NSA divisions, each with its own priorities, former intelligence officials said.

When the agency's inspector general investigated the project's first three years, it found "inadequate management and oversight" of private contractors and overpayment for the work that was done, according to a recently declassified version of the 2003 report obtained by the Baltimore Sun through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Meanwhile, Science Applications International Corp., the lead contractor on the project, did not provide enough people with the technical or management skills to produce such a sophisticated system, according to industry and NSA experts familiar with Trailblazer.

The company initially was awarded $280 million in 2002 to begin construction.

Company spokesman Jared Adams declined to comment, saying, "We have been asked to defer all comment regarding the NSA Trailblazer contract to the NSA."

The reporting in this story includes interviews conducted over the past three months with 25 intelligence professionals, 13 of whom worked on or had oversight of Trailblazer. Because the program is classified, most would not allow their names to be used.

Although the Bush administration spent time recently defending the NSA's eavesdropping work as vital to keeping Americans safe from terrorism, virtually no attention has been paid to the agency's failure to deliver the system NSA said was key to fulfilling that mission.

The government has been standing by while the agency has been "going deaf" as unimportant communications drown out key pieces of information, a government official with extensive knowledge of Trailblazer told the Sun.

After repeated requests for comment, NSA spokesman Don Weber said the agency would have no response.

Based at Fort Meade, Md., with field offices around the world, the NSA harvests virtually every form of electronic communication -- including phone calls, e-mails, video links and bank transactions -- through a vast array of satellites, clandestine posts at U.S. embassies, ground-based listening stations and military airplanes and ships.

But there are huge holes in the agency's information filter. As a result, a congressional report on Sept. 11 intelligence failures found that "potentially vital" information is lost, particularly with regard to terrorist groups.

That is what Trailblazer, launched in November 1999 by then-NSA Director Michael Hayden, was designed to address.

NSA officials wanted to change how they handled the deluge of digital data and spent a year developing a broad concept.

As initially envisioned, said four intelligence experts with extensive knowledge of the project, Trailblazer would have translated all digital computer language into plain text or voice. The data would have been analyzed to identify new patterns of activity or connections among people whose communications are intercepted, then stored in an easily searchable database. Key communications automatically would have been forwarded to the appropriate analysts, who for the first time could have followed up with their own searches of the database.

But years after the initiative was begun, there was still no unanimity within the agency on how to achieve those goals, or even on whether all of them were necessary or possible, interviews and records show.

A December 2002 report by the House and Senate intelligence committees investigating pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures found that although Trailblazer was "frequently cited" as the solution to many of the NSA's information management problems, "Implementation of those solutions is three to five years away, and confusion still exists as to what will actually be provided by the program."